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"The business of making native apps for mobile devices is dying, crushed by a fragmented market and restrictive business practices [...] will drive a rapid rise in mobile web development" - not in our corner of enterprise/gov thus far.
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Beat pages for Oakland Crimespotting, with downloadable data. Very good.
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It's good that UK police are on these self-incriminatory activities (web as evidential input) but I wish they'd put as much effort into meaningful output as well: public information.
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"agree with Michael that web-based applications are becoming much more important relative to "installed" mobile apps. But I think it's a little early for the obituary"
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Risk-averse/CYAing police culture, says Flanagan: "staggered" by the amount of forms officers have to fill in. It can take up to 30 per cent of their time."
rodcorp
books, stories, art, architecture, maps and occasionally how teams and systems work. @rod
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February 29, 2008
links for 2008-02-29
Posted at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 26, 2008
links for 2008-02-26
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Harry Palmer was the 60s anti-Bond (cynical rather than ironic), cooking with insouciance. Deighton's books are probably due a little renaissance.
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Chatham House is an anonymous mechanism approximating the trust that condenses in the air between people that know each other well enough...
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"Duchamp's unmodified choices are more like an act of praise for the well-made utility items. As he remarked to Brancusi, when they went to a Paris air-show, "Who can do better than this propeller? Tell me, can you do that?""
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"I’ve always found his cleverness one-dimensional and nerdish, lacking in heart [...] The others animate him; their presence allows him to be himself. The result is a more nuanced and, thankfully, less stern image of the artist."
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Darwent explicitly ranks Duchamp> Ray > Picabia, and suggests that MD's "influence on Western culture arguably ranks with that of Freud and Darwin".
Posted at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 22, 2008
links for 2008-02-22
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Post-Flanagan report and pre-NPIA funding, the PR guns are deployed across the police mobile data valley; in the fog of war, inaccurate targeting and fact reporting abound (though I don't blame the journalist).
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No, messy humans, management and trust problems are to "blame", as ever. IT solutions and process aren't usually solutions because, as the events themselves showed, we're bad at observing them good at gaming them, right. And good at blaming.
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Russcoff interviews Ian Rankin and Craig Armstrong about their opera...
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... and out of you for looking at it, and a museum for owning it. Seminal, urinal. He's not right though that no-one pissed in it, or in one/some of the replicas.
Posted at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 20, 2008
links for 2008-02-20
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useful for final close-of-project (and documentation?)
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"functions of a clock and a speedometer [...] records the vehicle's speed and the length of time that it is moving or stationary. The mechanical tachograph writes on a round piece of paper which constantly turns throughout the work day"
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Civ reboot books, for the apocalypse. Via Matt Ward.
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"No sooner had the Twin Towers fallen than the search began for the heroes of 9/11. But only men seemed to be eligible."
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Photos of TP locations.
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"When I first laid out these principles explicitly, I noticed something striking: this is practically a recipe for generating a contemptuous initial reaction [...] overlooked problems are by definition problems that most people think don't matter"
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Tournament for Rome priests "has already seen its share of red cards and rows on the pitch [...] Loud chanting, sometimes in Latin, will also be discouraged to avoid "disturbing the peace", the organisers said." Refs have blue cards (sinbin).
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"Soca papers, including one headed "threats to the UK" [...] had been stored in an officer's car [...] password-protected and encrypted laptop was also stolen. A Soca spokesman said: 'We believe all of the documents have been recovered'"
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"We also created our own maps because we wanted to focus on visualizing the data in our system. Google Maps is focused on finding places and routing between them (i.e., driving directions). This influences their choice of layers"
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"The trouble is, Duchamp was only in his mid-thirties when he abandoned art, hardly ever to return. And with his withdrawal the impetus of this show peters out."
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Adrian Searle on Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia at Tate Modern | Art & Architecture | guardian.co.uk Arts"Yet, because of the atmosphere of exhilarating iconoclasm that pervades the early part of the show, these sacred relics regain something of their playfulness, and begin to look like images from a lost, more innocent world"
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The history of Duchamp's Fountain.
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KK linkup ta.(tags: howwework)
Posted at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 19, 2008
links for 2008-02-19
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Unintended consequences: "But now the "seg units" at institutions such as Whitemoor in Cambridgeshire are packed with a different kind of prisoner: those so fearful for their safety that they have asked to be isolated for their own protection"
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"JoikuSpot turns Nokia Smartphone to a Wi-Fi HotSpot [...] share smartphone's 3g internet connection over wlan to any device"(tags: mobile)
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Good: postermaps, pinwindows, photos-in-pins ...
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Good roundup of convention-over-config thinking making inroads into enterprises. [And a reminder of something related: when your customer says "just make everything configurable", something isn't good.]
Posted at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 15, 2008
links for 2008-02-15
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"It has announced a £60m, 15 year contract that will provide its Criminal Investigation and Detection teams with access to the digital radio and data network."
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"It sounds like a double memory of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in spite of the title’s quotation from Yeats. The horror lies in our new, undeniable brutality or in the sheer panic of not knowing what we are."
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Little Springs ui patterns
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"Carrier IQ uses dynamic rule sets, which can be updated over-the-air, to track very specific factors [...] While these rules were in place, the client application would disregard all the other variables it is capable of tracking"
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"generate enormous number of reasons to put the book down [...] may be an interesting psychological reason for my lack of interest in plot. But when people say to me, "How do you read so much?", the only answer I have is that I don't do anything else."
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"Wood reviewed: Rather like Adam Thirlwell in Miss Herbert, he has a trick of coining grand aphoristic obiter dicta in a way that suggests no one had ever thought of the idea before. "Metaphor is analogous to fiction because it floats a rival reality.""
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How Fiction Works gets a B+: "Wood’s own critical register is complex, brilliant and occasionally irritating. Any distinctive textual voice, as Geoffrey Hill has pointed out, is a product of the way in which one writer registers the voices of others."
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"[Elvis] stopped by my dressing room and told me that he, too, had an oblique sense of humor [...] Then he said, "Do you want to see my guns?" After emptying the bullets into his palm, he showed me two pistols and a derringer."
Posted at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 12, 2008
links for 2008-02-12
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"That which primarily conditions choice and action in the urban environment is no longer physical, but resides in the invisible and intangible overlay of digital information that enfolds it."(tags: architecture cities)
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Oakland Crimespotting back back back, after the careful nurture of city officials etc.(tags: criminaljustice maps)
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Feat. Hollein's 1964 Aircraft Carrier City in Landscape, in frustratingly microscopic size online, as ever.
Posted at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 11, 2008
links for 2008-02-11
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V.Bush: information-processing work more enjoyable if user can "reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important."(tags: memory)
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the return of post-scarcity economics?
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Very interesting show by Doig at Tate Britain: he's an extremely good painter but some of these works seem uncertain, unfinished (and in fact he made changes to some during the install)
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"with their multiple layers, their agglomeration of touches, their blips and fuzziness and irradiated patches. Not everything he has done is entirely believable or an unmitigated success, but I don't believe Doig is capable of making a boring painting."
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"shows me a painting featuring a middle-aged man, stripped to the waist and in good shape, executing a table-tennis shot. He had hoped to have it ready for the next week's opening of his exhibition at Tate Britain. But he isn't yet happy with the torso."
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"Window Pane (1993) is not what it says it is – less Alberti's open window than a wall, a thing we're both invited and forbidden to see through [...] constantly waged, between surface and depth, things hidden and revealed, is where Doig really wins out.
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"Like the dreams he evokes, Doig's visions disintegrate when they are analysed. The atmosphere dissolves. These pictures have a mysterious resonance, not a rational meaning. Just look at a couple and enjoy them because they are so pretty."
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Very good on the tensions between technology/systems/systematised process and the human/intuition.
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Another good Criminal story.
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Good essay by Adrian Searle, and other bits. This Phaidon edition has a wider range of bigger images than the catalogue of the current show at Tate Britain.
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Bob Quick, chief constable of Surrey, to replace the retiring Andy Hayman as Assistant Commissioner Specialist Operations for the Metropolitan Police.(tags: criminaljustice police)
Posted at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 10, 2008
Holding, folding, thumbing, cleaning lens tissue
I found this card packaging somewhere on a shelf or among some files in my dad's study. It's for the "Whatman 105 lens cleaning tissue" for a camera, circa 1980s I'd guess, and it still has one or two thin tissues inside it.
The best bit is the back: the packaging is folded up into a little envelope, and has this lovely design on it. Firstly, there's a thumbprint placed at the bottom where they want you to put your thumb so that the tissues don't fly away in the wind when you open it up. The thumbprint is in blue, as if it had been manually printed in finger-print ink directly onto the card.
The thumbprint is also visible in the instructional diagram above, which shows what it's going to look like when you've opened up the package - very nicely drawn. And those two designs work together, almost redundantly, to tell the story. And lastly, the instructional diagram is printed onto the envelope's flap so that diagram doesn't need to recursively represent a smaller version of itself ad infinitum as you open it.
I really like it.
Posted at 09:16 PM in Art, architecture, books | Permalink | Comments (1)
February 09, 2008
links for 2008-02-09
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"has recognised this in his challenge to government to leave much more control in the hands of local people. [...] The review is sensibly suggesting ways in which we can better support sworn officers. It is not advocating reduction or replacement."
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PSA reaction: "We particularly welcome the recommendations relating to cutting bureaucracy for ALL officers. The changes to the Stop and Account procedures, in particular, will make a significant difference to frontline officers."
Posted at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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